sh fashion, but I think she showed good feeling
in declining it. Naturally, I approved of her doing it, knowing how many
chances there were that I mightn't be able to--to play up--myself."

After this conversation Davenant could not but marvel at the ease with
which their host passed the cigars again and urged him personally to
have another glass of Chartreuse. "Then suppose we join the ladies," he
added, when further hospitality was declined.

Guion took the time to fleck a few specks of cigar-ash from his
shirt-bosom and waistcoat, thus allowing Rodney Temple to pass out
first. When alone with Davenant he laid his hand upon the younger man's
arm, detaining him.

"It was hardly fair to ask you to dinner," he said, still forcing an
unsteady smile, "and let you in for this. I thought at first of putting
you off; but in the end I decided to let you come. To me it's been a
sort of dress-rehearsal--a foretaste of what it'll be in public. The
truth is, I'm a little jumpy. The role's so new to me that it means
something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve. I recall you as a
little chap," he added, in another tone, "when Tom Davenant and his wife
first took you. Got you out of an orphanage, didn't they, or something
like that? If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale--"

"It was Hallett--Peter Hallett."

"Hallett, was it? Well, it will do no harm for a young Caesar of finance
like you to see what you may come to if you're not careful. Morituri te
salutamus, as the gladiators used to say. Only I wish it was to be the
arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby
Jukes."

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because
his thoughts were incoherent. Perhaps what was most in the nature of a
shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his
personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically
into ruin. While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any
misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has
to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion's hand on his shoulder he knew
that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred
violently, that had rarely been affected before. He had once, as a boy,
saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window
of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders
restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible re